JOE'S APARTMENT
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1996 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Directed by John Payson Rating: ** (Maltin scale)
A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1996 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Right after I'd seen JOE'S APARTMENT, I was checking out the poster with its promise of "Sex, Bugs, and Rock 'n' Roll," when some punk kid with a crew cut came up to me and asked me what I'd just seen. "That," I said, motioning towards the advertisement in front of me. "Was it any good?" the young scruff persisted. My immediate response was to roll my hand from side to side, indicating ambivalence, but then I thought about it for a moment... Remembering the film's juvenile humor, broad slapstick, toilet jokes, squeaky, high-pitched voices, outright silliness and downright cutesiness, I revised my opinion. "Yeah," I told him, "you'll enjoy it."
JOE'S APARTMENT is based on an original short subject that aired on MTV in 1992. As nothing succeeds like success, it didn't take long for creator John Payson to pull, tug, and stretch his initial concept into a ninety-minute feature. Grown-ups might find JOE'S APARTMENT a little insubstantial as a result of that expansion, but it's not without its charms.
Not something you'd expect, necessarily, from a film crawling with fifty thousand cockroaches.
Computer generated roaches, that is, and singing and dancing ones at that.
The movie opens with our farm fresh hero, Joe (an affable lug played with open-mouthed conviction by Jerry O'Connell), hopping off the bus in New York City. Jobless, the first thing he looks for is a place to stay. But every damp, dirty, and wallpaper-peeling dive he looks at runs to four figures. "Anything for $100 a month?" he asks. "Try Nebraska!" suggests a witty slumlord.
Finally Joe stumbles upon a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village--"the nastiest neighborhood in New York"--and by an opportune twist of fate becomes the new tenant. Much to the chagrin of landlords Vladimir and Jesus Bianco (Shiek Mahmud-Bey and Jim Sterling) that is, who want him out so that they can work a scam with a local senator (Robert Vaughn) to raze the property and build a maximum security federal prison on the lot.
But Joe is in and settling down and discovering that he's got a roommate problem. Stuff moves. Food gets eaten. The place hums with a chorus of tiny falsetto voices. Finally, Joe gets to meet his diminutive uninvited guests, a veritable army of wise-cracking, vaudevillian cockroaches who form an immediate kinship with their human lodger on account of his slobbiness.
These beetles have attitude. And a code of honor. And talent, belting out a variety of "roach songs" throughout the film, from rap to gospel to Busby Berkeley-inspired production numbers, each one sillier and cornier than the last. And the singing cockroaches are also on hand to help Joe win the heart of the senator's daughter Lily (Megan Ward). Lily, of course, is unaware of her unscrupulous, fetishistic father's plans for the site, and instead dreams of turning it into a community garden.
It's a socially-relevant, environmentally-conscious love story with songs and bugs. Lots of bugs.
I had guessed that the inquisitive youth outside the theater would get a kick out of watching grown men pushing old folk down stairs, picking up poop, and wearing women's undies. If I was right, then he certainly enjoyed spending the afternoon at JOE'S APARTMENT. If not, at least he couldn't have been offended by this harmless no-brainer.
-- David N. Butterworth
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